Businesses and other enterprises generate large amounts of information, which must be stored in a cost-effective manner while ensuring acceptable levels of availability, security, and accessibility. Different types of data have different storage requirements. Stored information is currently managed through a set of manual, automatic, or semi-automatic policies, procedures, and practices. These methods are applied in a variety of ways to a variety of data and data storage systems. For example, the methods can be applied to a specific volume, storage array, object, file, folder, database, or file/data types. When an ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) managed system sets the retention period, storage prioritization, deletion date, etc. of a specific file or object, it typically does so based on one or more criteria, such as date of the file's creation, type of file, location of the file, date of the file's last use, etc.
However, such criteria are generally quite coarse and fail to give enough information to accurately characterize the proper treatment of the file or object. Thus, the ability of a system to automatically or autonomously determine ILM settings for specific data is limited. As a result, some files or objects are not handled efficiently or in the desired manner. For example, some files may be discarded or moved to off-line storage when it is desirable to retain them, while other files are retained when it is desirable to discard them or move them to off-line storage.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for managing the lifecycle of files and other objects in a storage system.